One bitterly cold March day, I joined a few friends on a trip to the former camp. Built in the early 1940s as a regular labor camp, Perm 36 was converted into a concentration camp for political prisoners in 1972.

I was in Perm, a city in the Urals, to take part in a seminar of the Moscow School of Political Studies. Founded by the remarkable Lena Nemirovskaya, the school s purpose was to introduce young post communist Russians to democracy, self government, and capitalism.

There are plenty of memorials on the sites of German concentration camps, and new ones are continually added. In Russia, only two Gulag sites, in Solovki and in Perm, have small museums that show conditions in the camps, the techniques of torture and murder, the documents, and the portraits.